Saturday, June 5, 2010

helix charter high school yearbook......2010

i wasn't going to post this but then - how could i not?

my daughter, rosie, is just finishing her sophomore year at helix charter high school. helix has had lots of trouble and terrible press in the recent years regarding teachers being accused/ convicted of having sex with their students and other similar trash. one way helix combated all this bad press was to regularly make public announcements regarding the extremely high test results its overall student body achieves year after year-- getting better each year. my daughter is one of the top students in her class, i am very proud to say. and its true, helix students do test higher than the other high schools in its district as a whole. (no she was not one of the molested ones, BTW - and get your mind out of the gutter regarding my daughter, please).
anyway, i always asked what does "teachers having sex with their students" have to do with the overall school anyway? and what about these high test scores? the district was threatening to remove the charter (or i should say, voted to remove the charter) because of the sex issues while disregarding all together the high test scores. the district mixes (d) apples with oranges.

the remedy: to recover the charter from being disallowed, the principal decided to throw himself on the spear and take early retirement - he was the sacrificial lamb. this move indeed did save the charter. but it didn't make a lick of sense to me. but that IS how it came down. we lost Dr. Smith to early retirement - yes, that's football player's alex smith's dad-- because of the sex scandals - not his own, BTW. to me, it is truly random to ask dr. smith to step down in order to to save the charter. i really can't comprehend this move at all.

but what about the yearbook?

my daughter was mortified when she got her yearbook yesterday - can you see what's wrong with the cover?
not only did this tiny (?) humility make its scene, there were other huge errors as well - for instance, somehow the yearbook staff forgot to mention/include sophomore students whose last names beginning with the letters M, N or O.
so what is wrong with the yearbook cover? clue to the cover....how do YOU spell school? it's not a joke. they did not mean it to be s'cool. that would have been clever.
the high school that gets the top testing scores in the district.....hmmm, i think the district has bigger problems than to attack helix's charter based on teachers' malbehavior-they better examine how the other high schoool students spell "school", etc.